Don't Fail Me Now(67)
I nod. “You should eat. The food here’s not bad. Denny likes it.”
Her cracked lips part in a shadow of a smile that makes my heart leap. “He’ll eat anything,” she says.
I stay with Cass through her meal of jiggly eggs, an English muffin with strawberry jelly, a bruised banana, and a grade-school-style carton of milk. She doesn’t say much, which tempts me to make a joke about how her brain seems undamaged, but I want to keep things light, so instead I just sit there and tell her stupid, mundane details about the past sixteen hours, from describing the nurses’ identifying moles and tattoos to the contents of the vending machines. Before she gets carted off for a follow-up MRI, Denny comes in nervously and hands her a get-well card that Leah helped him make, featuring rainbows and shooting stars and a pack of carnivorous dinosaurs.
“I’m framing this one,” she says, giving him a weak but affectionate squeeze. I leave her room clinging to that sentence like a life raft. You frame something you’re going to keep. Framing means longevity. Framing means she wants to live. I know it’s a stretch, and that I’m pinning a hell of a lot of hope on something you can get for $2.50 from a discount craft store, but I don’t care. I’ll take what I can get.
Tim’s dad comes through with a money transfer through Western Union around lunchtime, and we pick it up at a grocery store in the strip mall across the street. Tim won’t tell me how much it is—I think he feels guilty—but he says it’s enough so that we don’t have to siphon any more gas and can eat at restaurants and do our laundry. I feel pretty conflicted until he drives us to a cabin at a nearby campsite that he’s put two nights of rent on and that comes with a fridge, microwave, cable TV, and, most importantly, a shower, a bare-bones outdoor stall with a wooden latch door that looks like the bathroom at Versailles, under the circumstances. I dig out some of the stolen bottles of hotel shampoo from my bag, and while the kids attack some take-out burgers on their bunk beds, I stand under that shower for fifteen minutes, gazing up at the sky. I’ve always thought those instructions on shampoo—wash, rinse, repeat—were dumb, because seriously, who needs to repeat? Now I know. I repeat and repeat and repeat until the bottles are empty, and then I turn off the water and scrub myself with a ratty towel until I have what feels like an entirely new layer of skin. I fall into bed still wrapped in the towel and sleep like a brick until four thirty, when Tim wakes me up to let me know we have to get back to the hospital before visiting hours end.
Cabin, hospital, cabin. Wash, rinse, repeat. We do this for forty-eight hours while the doctors watch Cass to monitor her blood sugar and make sure she’s not a danger to herself anymore. I stay with her most of the time and let Tim take Leah and Denny out to do normal kid things that ideally don’t involve police or paramedics. The doctors tell me she’s cooperating but not talking much, which sounds like typical Cass, only I don’t know if typical is okay anymore. The doctors don’t think so. They’re thinking of putting her on an antidepressant but are waiting for Mom to approve the prescription from behind bars. Mostly when I visit we just sit and watch TV and avoid addressing the Grand Canyon–sized elephant in the room.
“How’s it going?” I’ll ask, and then she’ll say, “Okay.” She calls her therapist Dr. Zhivago, even though his name is Dr. Zinsser. Snark seems like a good sign, but I know it’ll be cold comfort when she’s doing her own shots again. She’s asked me for her phone a few times, but I keep pretending I can’t find it. I don’t want anyone to be able to get to her. I’m even thinking she shouldn’t come with us to see Buck. Maybe Tim’s newfound cash can buy her and Denny some hot dogs and a ride on the carousel at the Santa Monica Pier. Ironically, she might be safer dangling over a boardwalk than in a room with her biological father—from a psychological standpoint, anyway.
Both nights, Tim and I share a bed. It’s not premeditated, but there’s only a queen and a set of bunk beds. Denny is all about the bunk beds, and Leah does not want to share a mattress with anyone, if she can avoid it. We both act like it’s no big deal, even though we know it is. We’ve hardly touched since our frigid bench détente—turns out the combo of a hospital setting and a cabin room with two younger siblings isn’t exactly a recipe for torrid romance—and so we ease under the covers like we’re playing a game of old-school Operation, trying not to touch any of the wrong parts. But the first morning we wake up hardcore spooning, and on the second morning he wakes me with a sleepy kiss.
“Oh my God, gross,” Leah groans from her bed, pulling the blanket over her face.
Just like in the movies.
? ? ?
Cass is discharged Tuesday afternoon, thanks to a fax from the Baltimore City Detention Center signed in my mom’s jagged scrawl that looks like two Ms having a fistfight. I bring Cass a freshly laundered hoodie, socks, underwear, and jeans, but she takes hours to emerge, and when she does I see that one of the nurses has braided her hair into thick cornrows. They look good, even if they turn my stomach a little thanks to Erica, and Cass seems to be in an okay mood. She actually high-fives Dr. Zinsser, and when they snip off her hospital bracelet, she gives it to Denny as a present. He loses it in the elevator down to the parking lot, but still, it’s the thought that counts.
Dr. Chowdhury leaves me with an awkward demi-hug and a Xerox listing the warning signs for suicidal ideation. “She already knows this,” he tells me, “but for the foreseeable future Cassidy should not have access to her insulin. She can continue to give herself the shots, but someone else needs to measure them out and make sure they don’t exceed the prescribed dosage. And she needs to be supervised for every injection until you trust her again.”